Foreign Languages
I am not unique in the fact that I am bilingual. Most of the people I know are bilingual or trilingual. I can speak both Chinese and English, and even though I have taken a few years of French I don't consider myself fluent in it. I respect people who enjoy learning and speaking new languages, even though I personally don't enjoy it. I have traditionally struggled when it comes to learning a new language, I even struggle fantastically when it comes to English. In this blog post I will be discussing how I feel about Foreign Languages.
Back when I was child, my father decided that I needed to learn Chinese. I absolutely hated it. I had Chinese Sunday School, and memorizing all the individual characters gave me a headache. I tried to learn at first, but after feeling virtually no progress, I gave up. However, despite the fact that I stopped trying to actively learn Chinese, I still became fluent and literate from my occasional trips back to China. Spending even a few weeks in a different language can help your vocabulary and pronunciation tremendously. I currently plan to visit China sometime during my University years for a semester or possibly an internship, it would increase my language skills tremendously and be pretty fun as well. However I will still stand by the fact that I absolutely hate actively learning a new language. By being around language, I can naturally pick it up, but consciously trying to pick up language is a complete pain.
French was the bane of my school life when I took it. In fact, I considered the school day over when French class was over. It was always my hardest class, I struggled to keep up and nothing made any sense at all to me. I could go on and on about how much I hated French class (I still like the language, just the process is death), but I'll just say that I quit after a bit.
To me, language is a form of communication, written, spoken/signed, or both. This means that aside from the typical languages we think of everyday, there are several others, such as math and music. In both math and music, you can gain a lot of information from just looking at the markings on a paper. Another prominent language is computer language: Java, C, python, etc.
And just like how I hate learning a language, I hate computer programming. Math to me is fine, music to me is fine, science is also more than fine, however computer program is most definitely not fine. All these conventions and structures and things you have to know, its just as painful as learning a regular language. I accept the fact that knowing computer language will probably be very useful in the future, and that I will probably have to learn it at some point, but it is not something I look forward to.
That's true! Computer programming is the worst. It's like a second set of rules got superimposed over everything, but you can't decipher any of it.
ReplyDeleteI love learning German, but I learned it in second grade, so maybe that's why it doesn't bother me so much anymore.
I find that the process of learning a language is never ending. There are always improvements to every language from new vocab to popular slang. Even as a native speaker, I struggle with English.
ReplyDeleteI agree that going to a country that solely speaks that language is an amazing tool. I still can't read Chinese for my life, but I can understand simple conversation thanks to my past trips. (Sometimes I'll ease-drop a bit if someone is talking about me...) Same goes for Japanese, I improved after my visit to Japan. At school, they usually try to hand you a textbook and make you start from the actual structure of the language.
Regardless, practice makes perfect no matter what type of method you use. I feel that there's benefits from both being where the language is used and studying from a school setting.
Hahahaha, I felt this post hard. My mom is a CS major, and has used Python prominently in her work. While she tried to teach me many many times I hated it more and more each time she tried. I think the only way that learning a language is not painful is if there is a direct objective involved. For example, how I started to actively learn Korean to reconnect with my family in Korea. In the same way, once I had an objective, I found that learning a programming language was not as painful as it was before. I hope some day you find this to be true as well. Great post.
ReplyDeleteI can relate to the struggles of learning a foreign language. There are so many specific rules to learn. In addition, some languages, like Chinese, don't have an alphabet so learning how to write is an arduous task. I've forgotten all of the characters I learned when I was younger, but have managed to maintain fluency in speaking Chinese. As I've gotten older, I've started to value the fact that I'm bilingual and I sometimes wish my parents made me learn more languages when I was younger.
ReplyDeleteLearning a new language is so hard. it takes focus and dedication, and even then you'll never be truly fluent until you have an environment where you can be totally immersed in it. When I was really young my grandmother only spoke to me in Tagalog in the hopes that I would pick it up. I did and I was fluent in both English and Tagalog for a few years until she stopped and I suddenly had no one to talk to in it. I've tried to relearn it several times to no avail. Knowing multiple languages is a gift that I wish I still had. :(
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ReplyDeleteFrench was tough for me to be honest. I'm not particularly talented in learning new languages. It's tough for me. I want to use English, and because my accent is terrible and pungent, I sound stupid when I talk in other languages. On the other hand, I actually like computer languages unlike you do. But I understand your frustration with them as well. Computer languages can be crazy and annoying at times.
ReplyDeleteDang I feel the pain of going to Chinese school. As a child I dreaded every Sunday, sitting in a classroom for hours just memorizing characters and reading. In a way I really appreciated it though because that was what taught me how to sleep in class very subtly without the teacher noticing. I can't say the same about programming languages though. I think they're fun to learn because they give you the ability to solve lots of problems, rather than just communicating poorly(As is the case with my French).
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